Poor leadership, under-qualified recruits and haphazard training have left Britain's police forces incapable of fulfilling their core role of fighting crime on the beat, a commission of experts has concluded.

The damning indictment - which comes as the government launches a series of police reforms - is contained in a 150-page report to be published tomorrow.

Its authors, assembled by the right-of-centre think-tank Politeia, include two top former police officers as well as the former prisons inspector David Ramsbotham and former schools inspector Christopher Woodhead.

In a study of recruitment, leadership and morale in Britain's 43 police forces, the report says that in key areas the police service has remained unchanged since it was set up 200 years ago.

There is no minimum academic standard for new recruits, the report says. Other requirements are ill-defined, or irrelevant to the crime-fighting role the public wants from the police. Recent efforts to attract graduates have largely failed. Training has been hampered by a lack of clear standards and in some cases qualified staff.

Leadership, the report says, has been hobbled by an antiquated 'one-entry' hiring system and no effort to attract managerial talent from outside. The result, it says, is a sense of stagnation that compares badly not only with the modern business world but with institutions such as the armed forces and the civil service.

Central government targets, the report suggests, have made things worse. They have meant more paperwork and fewer patrols, while also deflecting local forces from the main areas on which the public wants police to focus: fighting crime on the beat.

While the current range of targets includes 'crime levels, offences brought to justice and detection,' the report says that the overall effect has been to reduce attention given to specific areas where local communities want an improvement.

'The public wants priority given to tackling burglary, mugging, hard drugs, violence, sexual crime and racial attacks,' the report says, citing recent surveys showing that nearly half of people are dissatisfied with 'the way crime is dealt with'. Given the 'sheer difficulty of cutting through the bureaucracy and getting the police quickly to the scene,' many people had given up reporting crimes.

'The lessons from this study are grim,' Politeia's director, Sheila Lawlor, said. 'Policing suffers from low-quality recruits, poor leadership and a structure of divided authority. Both training and employment lack direction, and even a sense of fundamental purpose, with confusion about what the police are employed to do and how well they do it. As a result, the system is failing.'

The report comes as the government embarks on a series of police reforms, including a reduction in the number of local forces by amalgamating some of them into larger units.

Last week, Home Office Minister Hazel Blears published the first annual performance evaluations for police forces around the country.

She said: 'It will enable local communities to understand the performance of their force, thereby promoting accountability and responsiveness.'

The Politeia report calls for 'more radical' change - including the reorganisation of the police service by creating an FBI-type national force for specialised crime fighting.

But its main recommendations cover the way police are recruited, trained and led. It wants entry standards raised, a fast-stream career option for potential management and leadership candidates, and an 'urgent' reorganisation of training with clear goals at each stage.